A US study on older people has now revealed a 40 percent increased risk of developing diabetes after a SARS-CoV-2 infection. The study was published a few days ago in “Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology” and broadly confirms the first similar study results.
“There is growing evidence that people with Covid-19 can suffer a whole range of consequential damage, including diabetes, beyond the acute phase of a SARS-CoV-2 infection. The extent of the risk and the frequency of diabetes after the acute illness are but has not yet been fully presented,” wrote Yan Xie and Ziyad Al-Aly of the Center for Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Saint Louis University and the US Military Department of Veterans Affairs, respectively, in the journal (DOI: 10.1016/S2213-8587( 22)00044-4).
“Increased Risk of Diabetes”
The epidemiologists analyzed the data of 181,280 policyholders of the US institution for former military personnel with an average age of around 60 years (88 percent men) who had received a positive SARS-CoV-2 test between March 1, 2020 and September 30, 2021 and were still alive after 30 days. A so-called cohort of 4.2 million people of the same age with similar characteristics without Covid 19 disease from the same period and a second group of around 4.2 million people from the time before the pandemic served as comparison groups. The decisive factor should be the new occurrence of type 2 diabetes within a year.
“In the period after the acute illness, people with Covid-19 showed an increased risk of developing diabetes (plus 40 percent) and more new cases (13.46 more new patients per 1,000 people within one year) compared to the current comparison group ) as well as a greater frequency of taking blood sugar-lowering drugs (up 85 percent) and more of these cases (12.35 per 1,000 people over a 12-month period),” the experts wrote. The comparison with the control group before the pandemic was very similar.
“Legacy of Chronic Disease”
The risks are apparently dependent on the severity of the recovered Covid 19 disease. For people not hospitalized for Covid-19, there were 8.28 additional cases of diabetes per 1,000 people within a year. In the following year, hospitalized Covid-19 patients registered 56.93 more new cases of diabetes per 1,000 people than in the comparison groups, and among 1,000 people after Covid-19 therapy in intensive care units there were even 89.06 more cases of diabetes. Obesity with a body mass index greater than 30 was associated with 15.7 more cases of diabetes among 1,000 sufferers one year after SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Ziyad Al-Aly stated that Covid-19 would leave behind a whole “legacy” of chronic diseases. In November last year, in a similar study in Covid-19 survivors, the scientists showed that the risk of acute kidney damage was almost doubled compared to people who had not had a SARS-CoV-2 infection (Journal of the American Society of Nephrology; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1681/ASN.2021060734). According to the Deutsches ärzteblatt, a study from Germany for people after a mild Covid 19 disease showed a 28 percent increase in the risk of a new type 2 diabetes diagnosis.
The expected increase in diabetes cases as a result of the Covid 19 pandemic is in itself already met with constantly increasing numbers of this disease. In 2000, 4.6 percent of adults were diabetic, currently it is around ten percent with 530 million sufferers. For the year 2045, the forecasts are for around 780 million diabetics worldwide. The driving cause is apparently the increasingly common obesity.